Liber Veritatis

The Liber Veritatis, meaning "Book of Truth" in Latin, is a book of drawings recording his completed paintings made by Claude Lorrain, known in English as "Claude". Claude was a landscape painter in Rome, who began keeping this record in 1635/6, as he began to be highly successful, and maintained it until his death in 1682. The book is now in the British Museum, and was owned by the Dukes of Devonshire from the 1720s until 1957. It was reproduced in print form from 1774 to 1777 by Richard Earlom and had a considerable influence on British landscape art. The title Liber Veritatis was apparently invented for these reproductions, but is now also used for the original.

The drawings, like most by Claude, combine pen and wash (watercolour), the latter brown or grey, and often both. There are often highlights added in white bodycolour, and less often touches in other colours, such as gold and blue.

The original book was a sketchbook made up of alternating groups of white and blue pages, in fours, with an average page size of 19.4 by 25.7 cm (7.6 by 10.1 in). Claude began with a self-portrait, then gave each painting a page, usually noting a few details on the reverse of the drawing: a reference number, a signature, the name of the patron and where he was from (if not local), and often a note of the subject. After some years he began to add dates. There are 195 paintings covered in this way. The book has since been added to and rebound, which is covered below. There are two handwritten indices, at least the first of which is now regarded as written by Claude himself.

Such a record of an artist's work is exceptionally rare from this or earlier periods, and has greatly helped scholars; drawings are noted in the literature on the paintings as e.g. "LV 123". Claude told his biographer Filippo Baldinucci, to whom he showed it at the end of his life, that he kept the record as a defence against other painters passing their work off as his, as had already begun to happen when he started it. The drawings became increasingly elaborate as the years went by, until "the book became his most precious possession and virtually an end in itself as a work of art".

The drawings of the Liber Veritatis are records of completed works, the reverse of the preparatory sketches and modelli often made by Claude and other artists before or during the work of painting. Such drawings for recording purposes are usually hard to distinguish from preparatory drawings, and Claude's systematic approach is exceptional. Claude's last painting, Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia (1682, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) is not quite finished, and does not appear in the book; it is assumed it was still on the easel at his death, and so the drawing for the book not yet done.

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